Helen Dwyer
10 August 2025
Stan Grant. Murriyang: Song of Time. Simon and Schuster Australia, 2024
Murriyang: Song of Time is not a political book, though politics runs through it like a wound that won’t quite heal. It is not strictly a memoir, though it pulses with the intimacy of loss, memory, and familial legacy. And it is not a theology, though it aches toward God in almost every line. Murriyang is, instead, a lament and a love song. A meditation that stands at the crossroads of silence and speech, of forgiveness and grief, of exile and return. It is, unmistakably, a reckoning.
Written in the shadow of Australia’s failed Voice referendum, Murriyang emerges from a place of deep rupture. Yet what author Stan Grant offers is not despair, but Yindyamarra: a Wiradjuri word that means silence, respect, kindness, patience. It becomes the heartbeat of the book and the lens through which Grant reframes time, identity, and reconciliation.
Silence in Murriyang is sacred. It is not absence, but a higher form of language, a space where the divine whispers in stillness. “God stopped talking,” Grant writes, “but was not silent.” Silence, for him, is not passive; it is a holding, a listening, a healing. And as he tells Indira Naidoo in an interview for Compass, it is often the only language left when words have failed—failed us politically, spiritually, and relationally.
Where The Australian Dream and Talking to My Country were fierce in their critique, Murriyang is tender and searching. It reads like a prayer. And prayers, Grant reminds us, do not always come with answers. “I want to ask… does God care?” he writes. “For that is the abiding question of lament.” This question hovers over every page, particularly in his reflections on his father, whose stoic love and tough upbringing mirror a generation hardened by racism and absence. Through these personal threads, Grant explores how pain and love can coexist, and how memory carries us home even when we live in exile.
Read more: Indigenous spirituality gathering aims to help Christians echo truth and love
Time itself is a central character in Murriyang. Drawing on Wiradjuri cosmology and thinkers like Miroslav Volf and Desmond Tutu, Grant stretches beyond the linearity of Western time to explore ancestral time, spiritual time, and “the speed of love.” Trauma has its own time, he insists. So does healing. So does hope.
There is theology in this book, but it is not academic. It is embodied. Grant finds God not in dogma but in relationship: in the breath of land. He writes, “I call myself a Christian because, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, I find the fulfillment of the sacred majesty of my people.” In Murriyang, the Wiradjuri and Christian traditions do not compete; they converge. The cross and Country are not opposites, they are mirrors.
Forgiveness, perhaps the most radical theme of the book, is not offered cheaply. It is wrestled with. “Forgiveness is the citizenship of the divine,” Grant writes, “the highest sovereignty.” In the face of generations of dispossession and violence, he asks whether love is even possible, and concludes that it must be. Not because it is easy, but because it is the only thing that might save us. In this way, Murriyang is a challenge to Australia: to return to what the Uluru Statement called for, not just legal change, but spiritual awakening.
In one of the most arresting passages, Grant speaks directly to the referendum: “All we heard was politics and law… Our ears and hearts were not attuned to the higher decibel of love.” The vote, he says, was a missed opportunity to say to people like his parents, “We love you.” This simple phrase, echoing across the pages, becomes a kind of benediction and indictment. A plea for grace in a graceless age.
But Murriyang is not only sorrow. It is deeply beautiful. Drawing on poets, physicists, theologians, and songwriters, Grant’s prose soars. He writes with the clarity of someone who has faced death, and the humility of someone who still chooses to believe in love. The land speaks through his words. So do the ancestors. So does God.
In the end, Murriyang is not a book to be dissected, it is a book to be felt. To sit with. To read in silence, perhaps beside a creek or beneath a gum tree. Because this is what Grant offers us: not just analysis or even answers, but sacred space. A space to remember, to mourn, and to imagine a better country.
Murriyang is a profound and necessary work. It asks hard questions with tenderness. It offers no easy solutions, but it dares to hope. And that, in the wake of heartbreak, is a form of grace.
Murriyang sang to me; it made me pray, it made me reflect, it made me cry. I’d love to know what you thought of it.
The Reverend Canon Helen Dwyer is chaplain to Grimwade House, Melbourne Grammar School and worships at St Thomas’ Werribee, where her husband is the vicar.
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